82 STATE POMOLOQICAL SOCIETY. 



It is right here, gentlemen, that I want to impress on your 

 minds tlie difference between the habits and wants of an apple 

 tree and those of our ordinary field crops. In the latter the roots 

 extend but a few inches in depth, and require the cultivation and 

 manures to be just beneath the surface of the soil. With trees it 

 is different. The roots of a thrifty young tree will run down 

 several feet in a rightly prepared soil, in search of food. This 

 deep culture will prevent young trees from being checked by 

 summer drouth, which destroys not a few trees, or prevents their 

 rapid growth, and leaves them to die a lingering death after a 

 feeble existence of two or three years. 



Is my ideal too high for the practical farmer, or gardener ? Is 

 it necessary ? I am now going to fight those little uprisings in 

 your throats, by some bits of personal experience and observa- 

 tion. Thirty-seven years ago, I fenced a little yard of thirty feet 

 by seventeen, about twenty rods from where we now are. I 

 trenched it all over with a spade, and labored hard in doing it, 

 manured it and planted it with potatoes and corn The next 

 spring I again spaded it very thoroughly, manured it heavily and 

 sowed it with beets and carrots. At the same time I planted a 

 row of young maples around the border of the plat which I 

 brought from the woods on my back. I headed them all in. That 

 same year, one tree produced a shoot fourteen inches in length. 

 Did any one present ever see such a growth the first year of trans- 

 planting a maple ? It is the only instance in my experience. 

 Persons now living can testify to the tremendous growth of the 

 whole row of trees. As I look at them to-day, they are the only 

 things which remind me that I am older now than when I planted 

 them. 



In a corner of the same house-lot I planted the same spring, a 

 large apple tree which I had removed from the old nursery planted 

 some twenty-five or tliirty years before by Gen. Juhn Chandler, 

 on his farm near the Academy. I dug over the ground some eight 

 feet square, but which was fifteen or eighteen inches lower than 

 the land adjacent. I set out the tree as high as I could, and with 

 a wheelbarrow, with which I had become quite familiar in those 

 days, I wheeled in a large quantity of turf, chip manure, and soil, 

 to bring it up to a level with the rest of the lot. I clipped the 

 tips of nearly every twig on the tree, but cut off no branches. 

 The next spring I had it grafted with the Fall Harvey apple. The 



